In a fight to improve society, no one is a hundred percent good or bad. Groups are made of individuals who are all fighting for their own agendas or areas of self interest. But it’s still necessary to find out who’s responsible for a particular evil, or bad conditions, and target them to fix the problem. We collect, work together, and create to solve problems. But this isn’t enough. Groups of people always fight each other for power. When trying to achieve important goals, or large scale societal change, there will always be large, powerful interests which oppose you. No one is one hundred percent to blame. Everyone’s decisions are influenced in conjunction with everyone else’s.
In a complex, interrelated society, it becomes even more difficult to figure out who is to blame for a particular problem, and without action, groups attempting to achieve change die. The most dangerous thing is for a group to lose sight of what’s important, become troubled by infighting, and forget what its identity is. A problem that gets worse in the modern world is being unable to identify your enemy. Without action, groups die. There is a ‘constant, but somewhat legitimate passing of the buck.’ CEO’s will blame their board of directors, or Mayors will blame their committees, who in turn will point out the Mayor was put in charge of a thing.
Sometimes the problem is not knowing where to get started. If things get too bureaucratic and complicated you won’t know what to do. Anybody who’s tried to cancel an incorrect bill, get a license, schedule an appointment, transfer to a college, work with a third party app, etc, will actually understand what I mean. Sometimes, the issue isn’t one of being able to do anything, but getting started somewhere, anywhere.
So if you’re staging a protest, or advocating for a social change, it becomes necessary to isolate a target, freeze it, personalize it, and then polarize it. The target needs to be a personification. It can’t be something general, vague, or abstract. Targets like, ‘city hall,’ ‘the government’ or large corporations won’t do. These impersonal targets are loose collections of individuals fighting for their own interests, no one a hundred percent good or bad. The public can’t direct its anger towards such targets for very long. An organizer or activist needs to be flexible and nuanced in their own mind. They can take time to weigh the pros and cons of a decision; but they can’t stay in limbo forever. When it comes time to speak out, it can’t be done half heartedly. Full conviction is needed.
The target will try to squirm out of being the target, either with deliberate, malicious efforts, or just out of self preservation. They will ask, ‘why are you singling me out? The are others who are responsible too.’ You ignore these arguments for the time being. You won’t have the time, energy, or resources to dilute your attacks on so many targets. Others who are responsible will compulsively expose themselves, fearing they are next.
Here is an example which can sum it up better than I can. This quote is from a book. For context, this book was published in the late sixties.
“I remember specifically that when the Woodlawn Organization started the campaign against public school segregation, both the superintendent of schools and the chairman of the Board of Education vehemently denied any racist segregationist practices in the Chicago Public School System. They took the position that they did not even have any racial-identification data in their files, so they did not know which of their students were black and which were white. As for the fact that we had all-white schools and all-black schools, well, that’s just the way it was.
If we had been confronted with a politically sophisticated school superintendent he could have very well replied, ‘Look, when I came to Chicago the city school system was following, as it is now, a neighborhood school policy. Chicago’s neighborhoods are segregated. There are white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods and therefore you have white schools and black schools. Why attack me? Why not attack the segregated neighborhoods and change them?’ He would have had a valid point, of sorts; I still shiver when I think of this possibility; but the segregated neighborhoods would have passed the buck to someone else and so it would have gone into a dog-chasing-his-tail pattern—and it would have been a fifteen-year job to try to break down the segregated residential pattern of Chicago. We did not have the power to start that kind of a conflict…
Many liberals, during our attack on the then-school superintendent, were pointing out that after all he wasn’t a 100 percent devil, he was a regular churchgoer, he was a good family man, and he was generous in his contributions to charity. Can you imagine in the arena of conflict charging that so-and-so is a racist bastard and then diluting the impact of the attack with qualifying remarks such as “He is a good churchgoing man, generous to charity, and a good husband”? This becomes political idiocy.”
Let’s talk about some bad modern applications of this strategy. Let’s say you are dealing with the issue of animal experimentation. This is an idea more people are open to discussing, and it needs to become political in nature. Now let’s say there’s a man who’s well known to be a national hero. He’s known for having worked sixteen hour days to combat a public health issue. Politicians make false, or bad faith charges and arguments against him to gain political power. This figure is the subject of all sorts of bizarre outrageous conspiracy theories. Some of them aren’t as bad by our standards today, but would have once been immediately dismissed out of common sense. So obviously some people hate him, but many people around the political spectrum consider them a hero.
Let’s say you start a campaign charging this man of approving horrible, cruel animal experiments. In general, Animal Experiments include torturing young baby animals, cutting open their skulls, planting electrodes, intentionally infecting them with harmful pathogens, testing chemicals and drugs. These experiments are excessive and bizzare. Now it doesn’t matter that most of the scientific community does this. You pick the best example of someone responsible for the practice and target them. The issue doesn’t suddenly become unimportant because there’s an issue that affects humans. Especially considering animal experiments are wasteful and inefficient.
But there are better targets. The majority of the public have no idea just how bad Animal Experiments are – even those who are against the practice. If you find a news network willing to pick up your story, the only ones which will do it will lack credibility. Because of the caliber of ‘journalist’ you’ll be working with here, the information will be so diluted, it won’t be recognizable. Certainly the public won’t be aware of what’s going on. The audience for this type of network wouldn’t approve of ending or placing limits on animal experiments, even if they’re willing to become outraged about an animal cruelty story when it suits them. Statements like, ‘this man tortures puppies’ will sound right at home with, ‘he drinks baby blood’ or ‘the WHO is coordinating a massive conspiracy with 200 other countries to trick people.’ Luckily, the message will be so diluted, it won’t even be traced back to you.
Said public figure should be petitioned to stop if they are heading any experiments. They should be exposed if possible, but to make them the target of an attack isn’t a good idea. Most people can only predict the outcome of a faulty tactic AFTER it’s been employed – but in this case, it’s a matter of being aware of our current political climate – or understanding the larger context of what’s been going on over the past few years.
There are plenty of other figures you can target, no less famous than the school superintendent from the quote I mentioned. Someone who doesn’t already have a massive reputation for being a national hero, renowned for their self sacrifice and 16 hour work days. Someone who doesn’t have politicians attacking them for their own political power, or have absurd conspiracy theories being very publicly thrown in their direction.
While these situations are hypothetical, I still think it’s important to talk about so anyone considering taking this approach thinks twice. I also think it’s very important to look back at our mistakes, even if it doesn’t look significant at first glance, because we all have tendencies to repeat certain patterns, and the only way to solve it is to be aware of them.
Anyways, it’s just a thought. Have a good day everybody.